The Study on Degradation of Stainless Steel Clad Plate Used for a Shift Reactor in Coal Chemical Plant

Abstract

Shift reactors are widely used in the petroleum and chemical industries, and especially in the coal chemical plants. The degradation of the reactor is critical to the safe operation of coal chemical plant. In this paper, a shift reactor after 8 year service was chosen. The test block taken from the reactor cylinder with the stainless steel clad plate was used and the test samples from the test block were prepared. And then, chemical composition analysis, metallographic examination, tensile and hardness tests were performed. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) method were used to study the degradation and degradation mechanism of the reactor. The metallographic analysis results show that there were a large number of carbides segregated in the grain boundary and the intergranular cracks were observed for the samples in the weld zone of the stainless steel clad plate. The SEM and EDS results indicate that the corrosion medium (i.e. polythionic acid) was found in the fracture surface of the samples from the weld zone of the stainless steel clad plate. The XRD test results show that the tensile residual stress occurred for the welding of the stainless steel clad plates. It is found that the degradation mechanism of the shift reactor was due to the polythionic acid stress corrosion cracking.